https://www.woodlockhousefamilycapital.com/post/the-century-club?mc_cid=d07adb9fc4&mc_eid=f8fb6e6a50
Companies have lifespans. And they seem to be shortening.
In my book 100 Baggers, I included a couple of tables to show this. Here they are:
Now, this is not an exact science and different people will get different estimates. But I think the story here is directionally accurate.
Juxtapose this phenomenon against the median time it took for companies in the study to reach 100-bagger status: 26 years. (The mean was also about 26 years).
So, we see another aspect of the 100-bagger challenge: You need to have a company survive long enough to compound returns into multi-bagger status. What kinds of companies survive? In this post, we’ll take a stab at an answer.
Inspiration comes from a book I read recently: Lessons from Century Club Companies by Vicki TenHaken. (Thanks for the recommendation Ian Cassel! @iancassel). The book focuses on companies that have been around for at least a century.
TenHaken became interested in these companies after hearing a presentation by Makoto Kanda, an economist who studied long-lived Japanese companies. Japan is home to some of the oldest continuously operating firms in the world, with seven founded prior to the year 1000. These are the bristlecone pines of the corporate world.
Fascinated, she turned to see how US companies fared. Corporate lifespans seem to be somewhere around 12 to 15 years. Not many have joined the century club. In the US, there are over 1,000 companies that have survived more than 100 years, a population of less than one-half of one percent of all companies operating today.
So, how did these companies beat the odds?
